Reddit is too popular and has too much group think, too many of the same types of comments that will get a lot karma, and too many comments that will just be ignored.
NEW is a garbage dump or a pile of duplicates. So why comment on a new post? It will never go anywhere. HOT is already full of comments, so your comment will just be lost.
The karma system also gamifies trying to find a variation on the same thing as always. You’re not trying to be clever or unique, or bring new perspectives to the conversation, you’re trying to be the first person to say the thing you think everyone else is going to think of
I’m constantly seeing posts about how much nicer kbin is, but I’ve also seen a “KYS” comment and personal insults towards people. I also recognize it’s possible that there are fewer nasty comments, that the ones I see are just outliers but I’m more likely to notice them here instead of just downvoting and forgetting because the posts about how nice kbin is are making the counterexamples stand out that much more.
thats crazy. im very active on here as my profile can tell and other than a run in with an alt right person on one thread, i havent seen anything bad. of course, as it gets more popular, this will increase, but for now its pretty nice
Communities are going to have to start actively moderating and removing blatant abuse like that. I haven't seen very much, but ultimately, we cannot rely solely on votes or people simply being nice forever. It's always a touchy question, but every community ultimately has some standards of acceptable behavior, and it'll take time for us to figure out what ours is.
To be fair some instances (like Beehaw) defederate for not being big enough to maintain a huge influx of users. It isn't always about Nazis although for sure Nazis suck I agree with that!
Sure, but anyone complaining about defederation in the context of "group think" probably isn't thinking about how much it sucks that small spaces can't moderate well enough.
Like literally these people are all like "FrEe SpEeCh" like dude if you wanna be a Nazi go be a Nazi I'm not gonna stop you but I'm definitely not gonna support you in it. You will get a hearty kick to the nuts if you approach me with it but like you do you
I would typically only engage with new posts, but in two places. One was some smaller subs where there was going to be more opportunity for discussion between everyone, and two in the larger subs would be breaking issues where new was by default and it was more group observation of the events going on in real time.
It was pretty clear to me, that’s why I stopped going.
It was getting toxic a long while back, but I was ok with that – I just deleted my account every few months so I wouldn’t get doxxed. But then I started to realize 2 things: First, many subreddits wouldn’t even let you post without a minimum amount of karma. Second, many subreddits would downvote you into oblivion for any sort of wrongthink.
Don’t get me wrong, I know I’m a wierdo and I have some bad takes sometimes, but you put bad takes out there to put them in the fire and then you get to see they’re bad or you hammer them until they’re good. But in the echo chamber, there was only one answer: Obey.
They warned us even back in the 70's that it was bad, then it'd suddenly get worse all of a sudden with little to no warning as things snowballed, but of course the oil execs just tried to shut up their own scientists and block them from influencing congress instead of listening. Even though they were warned that the threat was "Existential".
I don't really understand reddit's angle here... Why would they provide zero cost API access to an app, as long as the developer of the app isn't making a profit? Are they trying to act like that was the issue they had with these third party apps? That they e profitable?
How does it make sense for them to allow an app for that reason?
That's what Narwhal dev had publicly offered previously, there's no firm confirmation that's actually the deal and I'd be a little surprised if it was.
I think Reddit chose to give them a sweetheart deal because they're the worst competitor app, the dev had been least publicly critical of the API changes, and Reddit wants the PR value of an example case "proving" their API changes weren't maliciously anticompetitive towards third-party apps.
The fact that Narwhal has struck a deal now allows Reddit Inc to say "see! we do work with third party apps; it's not that we're bad, it's that RIF and Apollo are big meanies who won't cooperate!"
It looks strongly like one of two things has happened - either Narwhal took the knee and has accepted absolutely abysmal terms in order to remain in existence, or Reddit has offered them a better deal in private to keep them afloat - solely to use them as a PR example case.
The only thing that seems unlikely is that they're working under strict terms of the published agreement, otherwise IMO costs to users are functionally unfeasible.
Which raises another question: are analysts and investors so stupid that they can't read between the lines? Because this looks like using a bucket to douse a five-alarm fire.
Anything new is scary
Reddit is complicated, they just forgot.
The digg users said reddit was ugly and they would never use such an ugly site.
I tried explaining reddit to a diehard forum user, why are all the replies out of order? why are upvotes changing the posting order? this is so complicated!
Don't explain, tell them where to start and how to start. then it explains itself.
As a forum user, it was absolutely crazy to me when I first signed up on Reddit a decade ago that the replies would be out of order and sorted by popularity. But I grew to understand that it was a crowdsourcing effort in most ways and that the cream rises to the top. It was really quite good to get the information you needed out of the thread.
Anything new is scary
Agreed. Most people just want to settle into something comfortable.
This is 100% it. Also some people have only ever used iOS with the Reddit app and Twitter and Tiktok which are so easy to use a literal 3 year old can use it
I think this is also the cause of the squabbles.io Vs kbin/Lemmy split. Squabbles is like new Reddit, kbin is like old Reddit. And people like what they know
This last sentence is the crux of the matter. People don't like change, but quickly forget that they spent time learning the site that they're so familiar with.
It isn't hard to sign up for. No one is saying that is the case. It gets confusing when people start talking about adding subscriptions from other instances and how you can copy and paste the link and subscribe. That right there is where 95% of the people on the internet stop caring.
If the developers of Lemmy and the wider Fediverse ever get that fleshed out in an intuitive way I think popularity will go pretty fast.
That and long term if there is a way for information to be collectively backed up so that if some owner shuts down an instance everything isn't gone.
Agreed. It still is a pain to follow subs on other instances, especially within Jeroba. I know you're supposed to copy the !sub into the search field, but it never comes up.
You don't need to do that if that community is already federating with your instance. If its not, it might take a little while for the federation to actually start after you make the search (based on the server infrastructure of your instance and the remaining queue). Try searching again after a bit and it should be there. These quriks should be solved as instances become more stable, and Lemmy/kbin gets further developed.
For Lemmy, if nobody is subscribed to that community on your instance you have to copy the entire URL. E.g. you need to search for https://instance.social/c/sub in order to find !sub.
Once one person on your instance searches for it, then you can find it by searching !sub.
I don't know why Lemmy works like that. Kbin doesn't have the problem; you can find things by searching @sub@instance.social no matter what.
@sota2077 When I first came over to Kbin that's the thing I got hung up on, everything else I got used to quickly. There's plenty of smart people in the Fediverse, I'm sure someone will come up with a solution.
The question everyone was really asking was if will they will be able to make these quality of life changes before the Reddit API changes come into effect. The answer seems to be "no" unfortunately. It's a huge missed opportunity that may never come again.
Oh I have all the faith in the world that someone will come up with a solution eventually. I just assume it was never a major priority because of the userbase. With an explosion of users I'm sure they have a 100 things they want to improve and it is just a matter of time.
This can be alleviated a bit. If one person searches for an other-instance community by URL, it will become available for all other users through a normal search. So over time this becomes less of an issue, particularly if someone takes out some time to seed a bunch of these for their instance.
The first step is completely different from anything else you've ever done
"Pick an instance to sign up for"
This does not compute. What is an instance? Why do I have to pick? Which one should I pick? Compared to
"Create an account at reddit.com" makes sense and is something everyone has done before.
It doesn't matter how simple the answers to those questions are, the fact that the very first step requires multiple explanations is huge, and will always be a barrier to entry.
The first step is completely different from anything else you've ever done
This isn't really true, you already had to do this for email. Never heard of that being a barrier of entry.
My parents prefer to opt for local privacy/security focused email providers, while I go with gmail for the feature set and design. But I used to try out a few different ones to figure out which one works best for me. Still use a hotmail email for my Windows account.
I fail to see how this is different to the situation with lemmy/kbin instances.
What is this about having to copy and paste a link to find subscriptions from other instances? I literally just pull up the community browser and set it to "all" and then search.
Just be careful. That only works because your instance already knows about those other instances because someone already interacted with them. If you ever want to join a community on a non-popular instance, you might have to be the first person to search for it by copying and pasting.
Yes, that will show you all the communities/magazines that your instance has already discovered and have started federating with. But if it is a community that hasn't been discovered by your instance yet, you will need to search with the link for it to start federating. And once even a single user from an instance does that, the community will be visible to everyone else as well.
Yeah. Really, new admins should understand that they should be seeding their new instance, but the last couple of weeks have been... Kinda nuts? So, this won't really be an issue for most users long term. It'll be a thing for admins on small or niche sites that want to ensure they're discoverable and that their users can access the best communities.
On Lemmy, if nobody is subscribed to a community on your instance, it doesn't appear in that view.
In order for it to appear, someone with an account has to go to the search bar at the top right of the page and type in the URL to the community manually. Then it'll appear after an initial search.
On large instances like Lemmy.world, you can almost guarantee someone has already done this for most popular communities - but newer/smaller communities may not appear because nobody on your instance has searched for them yet.
For smaller instances, there are likely multiple communities missing and you'd have no idea until you went to look for them.
That's cause over time people have added communities to your instances repitoire over time. Network effect, essentially, making it easier for each new user. Tbh, if new users are on a bigger instance this should be a non issue.
Damn, what a great guy. He doesn't just make it easy to request a refund that he needs to pay from his own pocket. He actually made it opt-out. I've always used RiF on Android, never used Apollo. But Christian earned a lot of my respect in the last few weeks. Fuck Reddit and fuck how they screwed the people that helped them build the platform into what it is today.
Wow thanks for posting, what a read. I suspected average employees would not like what is going on.
I can relate, up until recently I was in a company whose product and decisions I strongly disliked and browsing r/antiwork like wild to cope. I was close to burnout due to the mismanagement and work heaped on me.
Until eventually something in me snapped and I went and found a better job. Is everything good here? God no, but my current manager is nice and my workload more manageable for now and I learned I have options if it grows unmanageable again, a lot of options actually.
So thanks for those who keep posting to move on as well, it‘s a bit repetitive and perhaps obvious, but useful nonetheless for those who don‘t see it yet.
Though if one loves the product and coworkers and work and the main shit thing is the management, maybe a union would be the more useful solution. It‘s a good way to influence some of these decisions, perhaps what makes my current employer better is the presence of a union.
He's had money thrown at him from VCs, thousands of people generating content, and administering content for free, sitting on a goldmine of data and goodwill and Community spirit, and he's managed to lose money, burn bridges, and fuck up the whole deal all for thppe sake of chasing a few dollars of API revenue and a bruised ego. All while others make millions and gain significant community support using the exact same data with business models he could have just copied or shared in.
He's had every opportunity. He's fucked it up at every step.
he's managed to lose money, burn bridges, and fuck up the whole deal all for thppe sake of chasing a few dollars of API revenue
Let's call this what it actually was though, there was no attempt at making money from the API. This was entirely to shut down 3rd party apps. Smart AI companies will just scrape reddit. The only people affected by this are 3rd party app developers and users.
This is even more amazingly incompetent. There are a near infinite other ways they could have handled 3rd party apps not showing ads, but they instead chose the brute force method that makes no one happy.
Fair point. And yes, there's just so many ways he could have made money from third party apps and their users without trashing them. The AI explanation just didn't make any sense to me at all.
A business brain would have followed the money. He's just following half-witted ideas/ego. I don't think he really realises or understands what he had.
The thing that gets me is that rif used to have a revenue sharing arrangement, which was axed when spez came in. He literally had a functional way of profiting off of third party apps and he threw it out.
Remember the threat that Reddit presented to capitalism's status quo around the height of antiwork and GME.
If Reddit falls, it will be on purpose. Same as the 180 of Twitter as a somewhat legitimate forum - Twitter being a key organizing tool during the Arab Spring (with the Saudis being the largest investor in Twitter behind elon of course).
Billionaires do each other favors to keep the class war in balance.
yeah i’m not sure this theory holds water… it’s pretty obvious the community won’t just give up: everyone saw what happened with mastodon
the fediverse is ideologically opposed to corporate and capitalist interference, so they’re just pushing people to a platform that they have even less control over, in a manner that pushes people to be more anti-capitalist, to a platform whose very existence is about being anti-corporate!
mayyybe you could say that combined with threads the “long play” is to embrace, extend, extinguish essentially moving reddit to facebook? but that’s a stretch and a half
i agree with hanlons razor here: spez is just a fucking egotistical moron
If this is how the admins choose to act, so fucking be it. I'll deltree my 12 year old account and never go back. As it stands, the fediverse is already my new home, and the users who decide to remain on reddit can explain to all the new users what the fuck went wrong.
The only people on reddit who are against the blackout are conservative assholes who hate picket lines. They're going to be the majority of remaining users.
Nah I’m “conservative” (at least that’s what they call me on Reddit now), and most of us support this blackout. The site has been hostile to diverse political opinions for a long time. Note how one of the largest subs, r/Politics, remained open the whole time. They are, by every metric, very left wing.
Don’t let the silly culture war divide us on this one. We all think Reddit has jumped the shark.
I hear what you’re arguing. People are much more complex than “left” and “right.” But, colloquially, the people on r/Politics, are left wing. They support abortion, and gay marriage, and trans people, and universal healthcare, and higher taxes, and a hundred other values typically shared by those on the left.
Old school liberals are certainly different to what we see on the left today.
It's all rather opaque, isn't it? I suspect you're correct, but if Reddit is actually paying for and controlling the moderation of /r/Politics, that raises a number of serious questions; both ethical and legal.
What they did to The_Donald where Spez edited comments to make the sub seem to be inciting violence, so he had an excuse to ban it, is a prime example and should be a red flag regardless of someone's politics.
The banning from several subs automatically of people who joined joke subs like "ChurchofCovid" is also a prime example.
Very hostile to differing political opinions.
I don't think it's a social media site any more, I think it's a propaganda site and a data harvesting operation.
where Spez edited comments to make the sub seem to be inciting violence, so he had an excuse to ban it
Not what happened. Spez, fuckwit though he is, actually managed to do a halfway decent trolling there.
A bunch of t_d people were slagging him off and insulting him in their comments. Spez got drunk as shit one night and edited their comments, swapping his name with Trump's so that it made them look like a bunch of anti-trumpers. Much gnashing of teeth ensued.
Absolutely shouldn't have done it, especially as CEO of Reddit FFS, but definitely funny as shit.
Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely a mark against him, but he didn't get them banned. They thouroughly got themselves banned on their own.
Also the people who say "well I'm not using third party apps so who cares anyway"
The thing they should care about is how reddit has handled this situation. Imagine what nonsense they'll come up with next if they're willing to turf away some of the oldest and most dedicated users
Exactly this. I've used RIF since forever, so RIF is Reddit for me. Even if they take it all back and everything goes back to normal, there's still a bad taste in my mouth. Reddit is clearly against the community, literally fighting it. Not even trying to find some sort of compromise or anything. So screw it, kbin seems pretty cozy so far, to be honest.
Honestly, even if they walk everything back, I still know they want to kill it eventually. Might as well already make my way over to other places like here, and stay with them.
I don't know, but I already think I like it here.
I actually used the newer official desktop site, and really didn't mind it at all. What I minded was Reddit acting like their company was Reddit. No, you just provided the website and infrastructure. You were not Reddit. WE were Reddit. And we liked Reddit as it was, not what you are turning it into to make a quick buck on your IPO. We didn't appreciate providing ALL the value and then being treated as if we weren't important or to be listened to. I'm tired of good sites being whored out for mega-bucks and then transformed into another sub-par lowest common denominator that is a ghost of its former self. I'll skip the wait and pain of watching that happen yet again, and leave now.
So yeah, I wasn't a third party app user, but in the long run I'll still be effected by everything corporate management is doubling down on right now.
"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die." Reddit is in step 4.
You're completely right from a user's perspective. I think this post from Cory Doctorow helps explain what we're seeing. He doesn't talk about Reddit specifically, but it should be easy to infer the implications for Reddit from what he writes: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
JUST LIKE TWITTER! I love that the new internet comes in two flavors, "open source hippie (doesn't work well)" and "vaguely fascist (also doesn't work that well tbh)"
I replaced every comment I had with a rant about how Reddit has become corporate shills and none of their actions are about profitability and all about easing corporations with the ability to targeted advertise to users while being openly hostile to all their volunteer labor and users.
seems like everything that isn't "kbin.social" shows a url instead of the shortened mention.
if you mention a magazine that is on kbin.social, it doesn't even work/show, if you mention a fedia or kglitch magazine at "kbin.social" it shows a short mention on my side but a full url on your side.. it is broken :,D
left kbin, right fedia, another kbin based instance - so if i post a kbin magazine on kbin it doesnt gonna show, while fedia magazines etc do show, but as a full url vice versa :) really chaotic
what I take from this, though, is that even with the anger against Reddit, there’s no talk of leaving in the comments on that post!
you hate the site and all of their changes so much and it’s only been getting worse… why do you stay? even the content is already worse, and even worse on the subs that have the new Reddit tipping system… why stay?
Generally speaking the solution to these sorts of things when one doesn't want it is "then don't use it." That's especially true in a federated, decentralized system like this.
Why? I mean, technologically, why couldn’t a more standard payment platform work, and then just pass around those payments among instances? PayPal is not crypto, but you can use it almost anywhere online.
PayPal is not decentralized. None of the "more standard" payment platforms are. If you want to have some kind of cross-instance limitation on things like awards and not have instances be able to just spew them out willy-nilly if they want to then you're going to need some kind of decentralized ledger to track them authoritatively, and that's basically cryptocurrency in a nutshell. This is what cryptocurrency is for.
Yeah it's been enabled on the crypto reddits for a while... as a result the subs overwhelmingly changed to "vaguely interesting and/or attention-grabbing but ultimately useless with a race to see who's first" posts, signal-to-noise ratio got way worse.
Put anything to a vote
Run weighted polls to make big decisions in your community, like getting input on rules changes or deciding how to distribute Points.
Unlike regular polls, these polls give a larger voice to people who have contributed more to the community. The more Community Points someone has earned, the more weight their vote carries.
This will end well...
EDIT
What they're really looking for are a bunch of whales to drive engagement.
Call me a cynic but I suspect the biggest ‘contributor’ to r/product will end up being product’s marketing department account, likewise with r/country and party-political apparatchiks. The move is elegant in a way: Reddit Inc can ruin true democratic operation of subs by turning subscribers into shareholders (which wards off repeats of mod activism) and simultaneously provide further cover to astroturfers (lots of points = Time and Effort™ = good faith actor).
Oh, absolutely this is the case. Reddit could even run bot accounts to gain a lion's share of points for any particular sub they want to control, thereby stifling any sort of protest or activism authorized by sub vote.
The article comments are linked to Reddit, if you click on "Replies" it routes you to the topic on Reddit where there are posts about leaving the platform.
So the incentive to make the best spambots won’t just be some project for influence, but an actual financial reward? Truly, reddit will be at the forefront of innovation.
Musk did the same stupid thing just now, rewarding accounts with many retweets/views with money (of course Fascists), making sure bots will bot the shit out of other bots to make a dime, of course Musk-lover Spez follows suit.
Iirc, you can follow them from lemmy. Kbin will let you interact because they show up in a special “microblog” area, but I’m not sure how lemmy handles it.
I really need to figure out how to follow lemmy stuff from kbin. When I see ones on the front page that are relevant I'll follow them, but I don't know how to actively seek them out. I'm 38, have worked in tech for over a decade now, and this change makes me feel like a damn boomer lmao. Committed to figuring it out though!
Really you have to use third party tools for discovery. Very hard to discover on kbin outside of the big communities. But I like kbin implementation of the threadiverse the best
RedditMigration
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